Coinbase: Mt. Gox May Have Stumbled, but Bitcoin Will Thrive

Problems at Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, have left early adopters wondering about the fate of the popular crypto-currency. But one Bitcoin backer on Monday made the case that it has a bright future.

Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of the widely used Bitcoin wallet Coinbase, said during a one-on-one panel at SXSW that what happened to Mt. Gox is essentially a tech version of natural selection–arguing that companies that don’t know what they’re doing will fall by the wayside and the stronger firms will survive.

Ehrsam, speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler, characterized Coinbase as one of the businesses that will not only live on, but push Bitcoin to grow into an accepted form of digital money. He also said that “some reasonable amount of regulation” from outside financial firms would be needed to truly push Bitcoin into the mainstream.

“When you think about who created email, I don’t think most people could tell you,” he said. “What matters is it’s an open source protocol that everybody uses now. The technology is what really matters.”

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